Musical Chairs

The Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is said to be under consideration to serve as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera.

Photograph by Hiroyuki Ito / Getty

Two games of musical chairs are currently distracting New York’s classical-music critics. The first concerns the Metropolitan Opera, where, it is said, the Québécois colossus Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is being seriously considered to succeed James Levine as music director of the storied company.

While the extraordinarily busy young maestro, who has become an audience favorite at the Met, has announced that he’ll be leaving the principal-conductor post of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2018, he has re-upped as the artistic director and principal conductor at the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal (the city’s second orchestra, after the mighty Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, led by Kent Nagano) through the 2020-21 season, and his current contract in Philadelphia runs through 2022. In addition, he has a substantial guest-conducting schedule next year that includes engagements with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics. An eventual gig at the Met, of whatever kind, would mean that he would have to walk away from quite a lot of this, though his bond with the O.M., the group that first took a chance on him at the dawn of his career, seems particularly intense. (Even Nagano had to leave his beloved Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, in California, which he directed for thirty years, after he became music director at the O.S.M.)

This uniquely energetic musician has done outstanding work with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which, despite its recent financial problems, is still in excellent shape. He also seems to get along well with the musicians. Yet some critics, such as Anthony Tommasini, at the Times, have noted weaknesses, maintaining that Nézet-Séguin “has yet to convey a purposeful artistic direction for the ensemble.” The orchestra’s upcoming program at Carnegie Hall—an evening of post-Romantic European nationalism that begins with Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” Suite No. 1, a work that major orchestras usually perform nowadays as a pops piece—could have been beamed in from the nineteen-forties.

Back at the Met on opening night (September 21st), Nézet-Séguin was certainly in fine form leading the new Bartlett Sher production of “Otello.” (For the young conductor to take on the privilege of a gala opening night from the great Levine, currently marshalling his strength for upcoming productions of “Tannhäuser” and “Lulu,” is certainly a symbol of something. Perhaps more than symbolic is the presence of Levine—who, due to his serious health problems, doesn’t do much guest conducting—on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s schedule next February.)

Nézet-Séguin’s performance was a touch reactive, gaining power throughout the evening, as the strengths of the staging became more and more evident—a reminder, perhaps, of his relative youth compared to such richly experienced opera conductors as Fabio Luisi and Gianandrea Noseda, each a regular presence in recent seasons. But, after intermission, Nézet-Séguin’s potential as a Met leader was fully revealed. Like those gentlemen, he would certainly bring a distinctive personal sound to the Met orchestra: crisp, buoyant, edgy, with less tonal weight but more transparency than Levine—in other words, rather French, with a certain openhearted, uncomplicated, North American appeal. It would be a novel departure for the house, but not necessarily an unwelcome one.

At the other end of the week, at the other end of Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic had its official opening night (September 25th), and it was a very good one. (Since the orchestra preludes this with both a “Film Week” and an official opening gala, a critic never knows quite when to get dressed up.) The creative tension here was provided by the friendly buddy act that went on between Alan Gilbert, who will step down as the Philharmonic’s music director, in 2017, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the illustrious Finnish composer-conductor, who is just beginning a three-year term as the orchestra’s composer-in-residence. In this case, rumors are flying that the Philharmonic wants Salonen as its next M.D.—not only because of his impressive track record as a maestro, but because of his experience, as the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director in the nineteen-nineties, providing the necessary vision and will to build Disney Hall, not to mention the decade of cultural buzz that followed its opening. The L.A. Phil-Frank Gehry pairing was historic; whom would E. P. (as he’s called in the business) pick for a starchitect this time?

As of now, Avery Fisher Hall has been merely renamed—David Geffen Hall, in perpetuity—not yet rebuilt. But the temptation to bring on Salonen would be tremendous. Presumably, he would have to back away from some of his commitments, too—not only his current gig as the principal conductor and artistic adviser at the Philharmonia Orchestra, in London, but also from the luxury of increased composing time and family time that leaving the L.A. Phil has given him. But there could be a way out: Why not revive the dormant post of principal guest conductor (which Colin Davis held at the Philharmonic from 1998 to 2003) and bring on a first-class traditionalist like Manfred Honeck to do some of the older Germanic repertory that Salonen might want to avoid? A Salonen music directorship would be such a vibrant presence in the city’s cultural life that allowances could certainly be made.

But all of that was mere conjecture last Friday night. The short-ish program concluded with Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben”—a rollicking post-Wagnerian tone poem of Trumpian grandiloquence—which was not only a sterling showcase for the orchestra’s new concertmaster, Frank Huang, but also, to my ears, the finest performance of standard repertory that Gilbert has ever given—confident and vividly three-dimensional, with every section of the orchestra proudly giving its best. It was preceded by Salonen’s “L.A. Variations,” a sprightly yet demanding twenty-minute piece composed, in 1996, for the orchestra that he brought to an unprecedented level of accomplishment. I don’t know yet if I’d put Salonen in quite the genius category of Leonard Bernstein of “West Side Story” and the “Serenade,” but Salonen has excelled where Lenny the composer heroically struggled, in synthesizing the influences of the music he loves to conduct—including Stravinsky, Sibelius, and Ligeti—into a seamless whole. This is the unique privilege of a European composer.

The evening began, however, with a ten-minute talk in which Salonen haltingly explained the workings of his piece to the audience in the classic music-appreciation manner, inviting various members of the orchestra to play this or that chord, melody, or percussion lick. Here was one of the world’s leading conductors willingly taking on the duties of an ordinary composer, awkwardly but genially trying to give his little kite a better chance of taking the breeze, pleading to a public whose patience is wearing away by the second. It was a sweet, if slightly uncomfortable, moment. One can envy Salonen his podium talent, his money, and his indestructible good looks. But, as Schoenberg said of Shostakovich, he is “a composer born.” A man with Salonen’s opportunities would only put himself through this if he really, truly had to.

Russell Platt was the classical music editor of Goings On About Town from 2000 until 2018, when he joined the music faculty of Vanderbilt University.